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USDA is down

usda.gov

69 pointsintelliot88 comments

I realize that people are a little annoyed at this tact, and think it is melodramatic. But consider:

* The servers may be hosted on a cloud system, and there is now no way to pay for them. (Even if the bill is due in 4 days, the employees can't do the work 4 days from now, they have to do it now.)

* Some of the information may be time sensitive, and the submission of forums may rely on employee feedback. These services may not be easy enough to remove in the time they have available to shut-down.

* Even if hosted in house, if the systems break, or are hacked into, then nothing can be done fix them. Better to deploy a hardened static page now than be infected with malware running massive botnets when they get back.

* They may have to turn off the utilities to their server farm, so they can't support anything but a simple static page.

* They have 4 hours to do all that, fill out some paperwork, and still make a backup, and whatever other responsibilities they have (like internal servers).

The USDA in specific also handles dynamic data from across the country, so more than some, they have worries about being hacked and having their data screwed with.

Pretty much this. Note that other government websites are also shut off or otherwise not updating, e.g.:

http://www.aoc.gov/

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2013/13-A06.html

All of this is true, but the lights are still on, and the T1 line is still piped into their building (not confirmed by visual evidence but it would cost more to shut it down and restart it barring a crisis causing shutdown >1month). Either they think the shutdown is lasting a while or their CTO/CWhateverO has a sense of humor.

They have to prepare for an uncertain amount of time. I think the botnet/hacking concerns are more notable. Especially since the USDA collects information from across the country.

True, and good on them for prepping, but last time it came to a midnight vote no one closed their sites. This might indicate a longer shutdown.

This is 4 hours after the midnight vote (remember east coast time), and the current climate does not seem to include a resolution tonight.

Also consider that who is furloughed depends on whether the relevant department has classified them as "excepted/essential" or "not-excepted/non-essential". Many departments are sending IT and security personnel home because it is much harder to justify employees (like support, IT, etc) considered ancillary to the department's primary function.

Depending on the requirements and scope of a cabinet website, and without necessary support personnel, it could be considered a risk to leave services running, especially if it's an agency like the USDA that relies primarily on discretionary funding, versus something like the NSA with is funded with mandatory spending and therefore has much more flexibility.

I'm not sure I understand. Let's say there's a need to have people be on call for the site 24/7 - for many sites it's not the case but let's assume they need it. But these people don't need to be paid hourly. They most probably get salary at the end of the payroll period (monthly or bi-weekly) as everybody else. And even if shutdown would continue that long, they'd just get paid at the next pay period. Now, it may be possible that some people would say "we won't work if we don't know we'd be paid in time" - but they don't know that either way, and their salary probably is not contingent on specific work.

Same with cloud hosting and any other expense - I have hard time believing it is billed hourly. Most probably it is billed monthly - and by the time this months' bill arrives shutdown would be long over. And even if it isn't, I've worked in the past with govt organizations, and not all of them always were the most accurate payers - but I rarely seen any contractor refusing govt job because of that. Everybody knows eventually it will be paid.

So I don't see the reason for the drama. It's not like US government suddenly has no money at all. It's a temporary technical issue with administering cash flows, and everybody knows it is temporary and everybody knows the bills will eventually be paid.

It's illegal for a government employee to work (re: volunteer their time) while on furlough.

> It's not like US government suddenly has no money at all. It's a temporary technical issue with administering cash flows, and everybody knows it is temporary and everybody knows the bills will eventually be paid.

Sure, it may be temporary. But the most recent federal government shutdown (in '96) lasted 21 days. Which is certainly enough time for issues/vulnerabilities to appear. It's unlikely this one will last as long, but regardless, I don't find it beyond reason that an IT team being furloughed could determine that allowing an un-maintained, un-monitored, site to remain publicly accessible could pose a security risk, or provide out-of-date information that otherwise appears to be authoritative.

What you mean "may be"? Do you seriously entertain a possibility that US government as of today has ceased to exist and US government bills will never be paid?

You must have misunderstood what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that there's absolutely no need to wait for 21 days for issues to appear, because the same people may do the same maintenance as always and there's absolutely no need to leave the site un-maintained. Of course, staff can be reduced - no new developments, no updates, no proofreaders, no marketing, no answering emails, etc. - to avoid taking too much un-budgeted obligations. But no one doubts there obligations will be repaid, so I don't see the issue here.

>>> provide out-of-date information that otherwise appears to be authoritative.

This is easily solved by putting one line on top of the page that says "All information is as available by 10.01.2013 and can be out of date". I admit, it's much less drama, but it's possible.

Besides the fact that it is illegal (http://www.bsnlawfirm.com/newsletter/OP0413_Natter.pdf) employees are NOT guaranteed to get their money. In the past congress has sometimes not provided backpay.

Also, if the website gets hacked, without sys-admins to fix it, the server's data could be corrupted or stolen, backdoors installed, ect.

> provide out-of-date information that otherwise appears to be authoritative

That's a good point. USDA data influences the financial markets in a big way all around the globe.

It's completely reasonable for them to not want to run such a critical site without anyone minding the store.

The US government is not being billed in 4 days. They're on a massive contract that is likely paid quarterly. Or likely a net 60 or 90 by purchase order. It isn't like they're on Heroku and the credit card expired.

They aren't necessarily pre-paying for services, and there's no guarantee that they will retroactively receive monies for the days that the government is shut down. So while they may see the bill later, they may not receive the funding to pay the bill for that period

What the USDA is doing is called "Washington Monument Syndrome".

It is a political tactic, wherein you deny the public access to the most visible aspects of a government operation during a period of budget cuts. You will notice all government agencies ceasing stuff like twitter accounts, which cost virtually nothing to operate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome

> What the USDA is doing is called "Washington Monument Syndrome".

Where will all the school kids visit if the USDA website is down? What about all of the international tourists that finally made the trip to the USDA website?

You make a completely valid comparison, because everyone knows that after the Washington Monument, the USDA is the most beloved site.

Shouldn't it be renamed "White House tours syndrome" now?

The US Consulate in Marseille, France is open for normal business today. I guess getting a US visa or passport renewal is a critical function that can't wait a week.

Actual information on the effects of the shutdown on the USDA, for those interested in that sort of thing: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/30/usa-fiscal-agricul...

Now that is very interesting. According to this article, earlier this year meat and poultry inspectors were designated 'essential personnel', meaning that they can continue to work even during a government shutdown. This is important because it's against the law to sell meat in the US if it hasn't been inspected by a USDA inspector.

Imagine the outcry if this government shutdown meant that all meat and poultry sales in the US halted until an agreement was reached.

I'd be one happy vegetarian!

Would you? Economic forces would drive up the cost of your fodder.

In the short-term perhaps, but if it lasted a while the reverse would be true as the market would be flooded with excess fodder production that would drive down the price of my fodder (Amount of grain needed to end extreme hunger - 40 million tonnes. Amount of grain fed to animals in the West - 540 million tonnes. United Nations)

Ironically, you can't straightforwardly get to the USDA contingency plans. The whitehouse.gov link on the page points to an index of all the contingency plans (across the federal government). Unfortunately, the entries for the USDA plans are just links pointing back to usda.gov...

I'd imagine you might get somewhere at archive.org (and there may well be other ways to get them from a .gov source), but still...

Is this purely symbolic, or is there some real sense in which replacing the USDA website with a placeholder saves the government a measurable amount of money?

Symbolic really. The same servers are sitting there, just idle rather than pumping out pages.

Not if they can't pay for the power or system administrators to support them for an undefined amount of time. Better to switch to a simple single server now than let the web page get hacked, fail slowly, or disappear completely.

If they have legal requirements like a report of contamination or unsafe conditions is investigated within N days after being received their only option may be to not accept the report at all. Unless everybody involved in the whole process is an essential worker.

Reports of contamination would most likely go through the FDA for announcements.

False dichotomy. It could well be that many parts of the site don't function correctly without staff. For example processing submissions, keeping critical data up to date, etc.

I fully expect Obama and Democrats to use every available tactic to make this as painful as possible for the population.

They truly need to have the US wake-up to an apocalyptic scenario. Anything less than that and people are going to see that the emperor has no clothes. If they could have airplanes falling out of the sky, they would. If they truly use such tactics I really hope people take them to task for it. With nearly four million people working for the federal government --a good deal of them solidly in the Democrat camp-- I fully expect them to terrorize us by fucking things up to the extent of their abilities.

As for the argument of cloud servers and other services in the private sector causing shutdowns, the question is very simple: Anyone thinking that the US isn't going to pay for these services is a moron. This shutdown will last as long as it does and then everyone will get their checks. Anything to the contrary is pure theater.

I just got an email from whitehouse.gov full of FUD. It's a disgrace that whitehouse.gov is being used this way (this isn't the first time). Democrats would raise hell if Republicans were in power and used whitehouse.gov for partisan propaganda. What a shame.

Tomorrow is likely to be the US politics version of Kabuki Theater. Could be fun to watch.

It's likely this is more than political. There's a lot of work they'd need to do to disable just the parts of the site that would cease to function without backend staff, or place appropriate disclaimers on out-of-date information, which drives literally billions of dollars in economic activity.

Four hours isn't enough time for that.

Where four hours came from? Talk about govt shutdown was out there for days if not weeks. And this is not the first time - n this administration, almost every year we're on the precipice of the shutdown. If they didn't have a contingency plan that enables them to put an emergency header on top of all pages on the site - they're doing it wrong.

The agencies are given a single half day to shutdown.

Given by whom? Were they kept in the cave without access to TV and newspapers for the last month? Did not they know it is a possibility? Did not they know it is a possibility now for years since we have a split Congress which can not pass a proper budget for years? Why they had to prepare for this entirely foreseeable circumstance in half a day - US govt can not afford one risk management specialist that could evaluate such circumstances and prepare a plan?

They did:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/...

They have 4 hours, using emergency funds appropriated for exactly this situation, to prepare the agency to be shuddered for an unknown amount of time. They have to make backups, close out current time sensitive issues, fill out paperwork about what went wrong with the plan so people can recover if someone else has to do it.

A shutdown risk appears every three or so months due to reliance on short term continuing resolutions to fund the government. Most recently, formal preparations began several weeks ago.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/...

Yep. This situation is something that can easily be prepared for.

This is probably either mismanagement or political posturing. (I'd bet the latter.)

The healthcare.gov site certainly works. This whole thing is nothing more than two fat guys arguing over the last piece of sausage. It's theater. From my perch in Avignon, France it's actually pretty entertaining. Watching Sheila Jackson Lee's caps-lock shouting 'speech' and wondering if the speaker of the House is going to start crying is good fun.

Somehow Heaven's Gate still manages to keep its site going fifteen years after its members committed suicide.

I thought they shut down Geocities years ago?

There are some advantages to having a purely static-HTML website, in terms of unattended maintainability.

In addition to the government, it seems many companies don't have one anymore. If servers get compromised, it's common for companies to just take the whole site down pending a fix, and replace it with a single HTML splash page. If they had a full-featured static-HTML version of the site, they could fail over to something more complete than one HTML page, but that seems uncommon.

This is a little confusing. The USDA's website is presumably hosted on some server, so what exactly is preventing it from remaining online?

I mean, the domain is clearly still here, and there's a web page serving that error, so...

The funding to support server + bandwidth + sysadmins.

Just speculating, but perhaps the IT person(s) responsible for maintaining the site are nonessential, and considered a simple placeholder safer than leaving the full site online and unattended?

That IT person has 4 hours to shut-down the agency internet presence for an indeterminate amount of time. Also, their server farm may not have power in 4 days, better to set up a simple website on some "essential" box somewhere.

Especially since the USDA receives information from across the country and performs statistical analysis. It would be safer to shutdown the dynamic services rather than let it get hacked. In 4 hours they probably do not have enough time to separate dynamic and static information when they also have to do a backup and a bunch of paperwork.

nsa.gov is still up, so they do have some priorities.

They're down now, although it almost seems more like a DDoS ("Taking too long to respond").

It's up from here. Odd.

It actually looks like they withdrew their A records. anl.gov is having the same issue (Though strangely enough, not mirror.anl.gov, so thankfully my systems can still update.)

PR stunt or massive budget decreases in government services? Either way it's not a good place to be in as a country.

My guess is more the former than the latter.

Then again, federal spending can be pretty funky in how Congress requires it be spent. I'd love to see all the information on how the decision to shut down the site was made.

Well if they have a server farm or cloud server on which the website is hosted it likely needs power and bandwidth (or money for a cloud service). Either they disappear completely or put up a static page.

Does anyone know who designates essential personnel? (5 mins of Google didn't return an answer)

Could the President designate all federal employees as "essential," to circumvent the budget requirement? (Yes, this would be a power grab by the Executive branch)

Just got en email from a client who is with the Dept. of Agriculture and he said "it looks like the government is shutting down on Tuesday" and for the life of me I just couldn't understand what that was referring to.

Yeah who needs that pesky regulation of food quality anyway.

Now if gun permits were suspended, it would get an exemption almost immediately.

Your gun permit is in the bill of rights. Why do you need a web site for that?

So is your right to vote - why do we need voter registration?

Where?

14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, 26th amendments?

Took them awhile to get it spelled out. But it also took them 100 years to end slavery.

One might also suggest the freedom from searches and seizures is also fairly clear. Be sure to tell that the TSA agent that is groping your genitals. Oh and the TSA is still fully funded.

The Constitution does not explicitly give you the right to vote in the same way that it gives you the right to free speech.

Wikipedia has this to say about it:

"The "right to vote" is not explicitly stated in the U.S. Constitution except in the above referenced amendments, and only in reference to the fact that the franchise cannot be denied or abridged based solely on the aforementioned qualifications. In other words, the "right to vote" is perhaps better understood, in layman's terms, as only prohibiting certain forms of legal discrimination in establishing qualifications for suffrage. States may deny the "right to vote" for other reasons."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St...

Maybe not in the 'Bill of Rights' itself, but it's in other areas of the constitution - for example, the 15th Amendment. Or the 26th Amendment. The parent comment is correct in essence - these are all amendments to the constitution, just like the 2nd.

I can have only one vote, and any number of firearms :)

I realize you're being sarcastic, but food inspections are continuing. From http://www.agweek.com/event/article/id/21778/

  If the U.S. Department of Agriculture shuts down at midnight tonight,
  food stamp benefits will be delivered for the month of October, forest 
  fires will continue to be fought, meat and poultry will still be inspected,
  grain inspection will continue, laboratory animals will be fed and the
  rural development division will still monitor government loans.

  But USDA will not release any new production statistics, most of the
  rest of USDA will shut down and its website may go dark.

What has a funding got to do with a website being up, the servers are still running.

tsa.gov is still fully operational http://www.tsa.gov/

Well that's basically just a static blog site anyway. The USDA site had dynamic information, statistics, graphs. The IT infrastructure for USDA is probably much more complicated than the TSA.

If it's down, don't link to it.

NSA.gov is down.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nsa.gov

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.nsa.gov

It's just you. http://www.nsa.gov is up.

In that case the government should stay closed down.

Wow, such melodrama.

How cute.

A pandering PR stunt by an overgrown bureaucracy. (The USDA is the home of the rabbit inspectors, bravely protecting our children from risky pet bunnies.)

The USDA agriculture arm (USDA ARS) actually does some really good work with nutrition scientific lab data (USDA SR-25)

I've also talked to several of the scientists for work, and they are quite the bright bunch and a lot do good research work.

However, I don't see why they couldn't leave the server up at least through October as I actually need to read a lot of their latest work.

This is a very rich and high-quality dataset. I started using it to learn data visualization a few years ago and have been tinkering with it in parallel coordinates ever since.

http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/raw/3150059/

That is SUCH A COOL LINK!

Just curious, is there a reason you choose vitamin c has the micronutrient for comparison?

So the USDA is largely responsible for our having some of the safest food on the planet. I mean you can mock it all you want, but if USDA meat inspectors aren't there to watch over the production; you might want to consider becoming a lot more vegetarian for a while. I mean, unless you really like eating cows infected with MRSA or Mutton with a side of scrapie...

Seriously, if meat inspection goes by the wayside for any length of time; people will die, because it won't be anybody's job to make sure the meat is safe and the folks who run meat-packing plants don't like that they can't wring every last bit of profit out of every animal they buy.

THAT IS THE POINT. We need them for food safety, but they blew their budget harrassing children and illusionists about bunnies. Now they are threatening to feed us diseased cows so the bunny police can get their paychecks back.

I repeat, it is a pandering PR stunt by an overgrown bureaucracy.

> they blew their budget harrassing children and illusionists about bunnies

Blew their entire $155 billion budget on bunny inspections, did they? How many of their 100,000+ staff are bunny inspectors? All of them? Or just 90%? What a load of nonsense.

Your hysterical "talking point" style comments add nothing but noise.

That's like saying "only a small heart attack" or "just one termite".

Can I get a citation for any of this? It was my understanding that the USDA allows cattle to be fed "cage lining" which is chicken feathers, poop and feed taken from the bottom of chicken cages. The chicken feed, in turn, contains cattle meat and trimmings, thus making your "side of scrapie" scenario a small but significant possibility.

In other words, what makes you think the USDA is not beholden to the commercial interests that it regulates, like every other government agency?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodborne_illness#Epidemiology

Look at the difference in Salmonella rates between the US and France for instance.

And yes, regulatory capture is an issue with the FDA, that has periodically resulted in scandals; but the meatpacking industry knows that without some obvious checks on their hygiene their industry as a whole is worse off. If one plant cuts too many corners and starts shipping moldy meat, the entire industries sales suffer; so it's in the meat companies interest to have someone policing defectors from good practices.

Right, who needs meat packaging standards!

Salmonella is just a government scare tactic to inflate federal budgets!

Oh emm gee. what will we do without google cache?

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